Ted Rall has traveled extensively through the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. He has written feature-length pieces for magazines, done war correspondency for radio and written books as a result of these journeys.
Rall’s first trip to Central Asia came about as something of a lark. In 1997 he was a Staff Writer for P.O.V. Magazine. When P.O.V. obtained significant funding, Rall buttonholed his editor Randall Lane at a party, asking him to send Rall to drive the Silk Road from Beijing to Istanbul via the republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Rall’s companion on this journey was Alan Feuer, who is now an author and distinguished journalist at The New York Times. Rall and Feuer’s trip lasted six weeks, and everything went wrong. They were robbed by corrupt policemen, got horribly ill and were—crucially—unable to buy a car. They ended up doing the trip by bus and train. Still, the results were “Silk Road to Ruin,” an engaging essay that caught the imagination of readers. At the end of the 1997 trip, Rall thought he would never want to visit Central Asia again. Six months later, however, he was aching to return.
His chance came in 1999. P.O.V. sent Rall back to the Silk Road, this time to write about traveling the world’s most dangerous highway, the high-altitude Karakoram Highway connecting Kashgar in Xinjiang, western China to Islamabad, Pakistan via Pakistani-occupied Kashmir Province. Rall and his friend Cole Smithey, the film critic, flew into Tashkent, Uzbekistan just in time for the first major attack by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a Tajikistan-based, Taliban-trained insurgent group, against the hardline Uzbek regime of President Islam Karimov. Forced to cross the Uzbek-Kazakh border on foot alongside thousands of refugees, Rall and Smithey made their way to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where they headed south toward the Tourugart Pass with China and onward toward the start of their trip on the KKH. In Kashmir Rall and Smithey blundered into Taliban troops—the first sign to the outside world of the coup that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power in Pakistan.
Rall returned to Central twice in 2000. The first time was “Stan Trek,” an August 2000 expedition in which, in a fit of madness, he invited 23 listeners to his radio show on KFI Radio Los Angeles to accompany him on a series of bus rides through the “Stans.” (“Stan Watch: Breaking News from Central Asia,” a segment on Rall’s show, had become a cult favorite on the BBC and NPR). The intrepid trip began in Moscow and continued to Baku, Azerbaijan, and on to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, before yet another IMU incursion forced them to cut short their trip. One major disappointment was that they didn’t make it to Tajikistan or Afghanistan. You can listen to NPR correspondent Ben Adair’s audio reports from Stan Trek for the “Savvy Traveler.”
The next month, in September, Rall went to Turkmenistan at the invitation of the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Turkmenistan. He met with Turkmen college students and lectured about political satire and dissent in the United States.
In November and December of 2001, Rall was part of a convoy of 45 journalists who went from Dushanbe, Tajikistan into northern Afghanistan, where the Battle of Kunduz was about to lead to the seizure by the Northern Alliance from the Taliban of that section of the country. He filed reports for KFI Radio and The Village Voice, as well as Universal Press Syndicate and Mother Jones magazine’s website. Rall’s convoy suffered numerous casualties, including three deaths. He soon wrote a graphic novella about his experiences, “To Afghanistan and Back,” that won major awards and became the first book of any type to be published about the Fall 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
Rall passed through Tajikistan on the way back from Afghanistan. His fixer mentioned in passing that the international championships of buzkashi—a form of “headless goat polo” introduced to Central Asia by Genghis Khan’s Mongols, now widely considered the most violent sport in the world—would take place during the spring festival of Navruz, in March 2002, in Dushanbe. Rall returned to Dushanbe to cover the event for Gear magazine, which subsequently went out of business. Fortunately, the piece appeared in print in Drill magazine. Which also went under. But later.
In 2006 Rall published Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?, a book that combines photos, comics and columns about Central Asia through the lens of his trips to date.
Rall’s next Central Asian sojourn brought him back to Tajikistan: specifically to Lake Sarez, a high-altitude lake high in the Pamir mountains in Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast, the most remote region of Central Asia. In 2007 he climbed the Pamirs to personally visit what could be the source of the world’s worst natural disaster. The resulting piece, appeared in Men’s Journal magazine in 2008. After Sarez Rall moved on to Murgab, the southeastern Kyrgyz town of Sary Tash, and then Kashgar.
Rall returned to Tajikistan in August 2011, along with fellow cartoonists Matt Bors and Steven Cloud, for a month-long journey through northern and western Afghanistan. He is currently working on a book about their experiences for Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Publication is scheduled for Spring 2013.
